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What was it like to be Zaha Hadid? From teaching to developing her vision to turning down an opportunity to work with Rem Koolhaas, in this remembrance we collect a few of Zaha's first-person writings and interviews about her life and work from her unparalleled, groundbreaking career. On being a... View full entry
Civil rights lawyers say the new service being touted by local entrepreneurs, Chariot for Women, would probably conflict with Massachusetts’ antidiscrimination laws. [...]
safety of female passengers has dogged Uber and Lyft Inc. and regulators around the country are debating new requirements for ride-hailing services that include [a] background check [...]
SheTaxis, or SheRides, faced questions from regulators in 2014 when it launched an app that connects female passengers with women drivers.
— bostonglobe.com
More on the technology and ethics of ride-sharing:Uber faces suspension and $7.3M fine in CaliforniaKalasatama, Finland goes carless (and yes, there's an app for that)Mass transit may benefit expansion of Uber and other for-hire car servicesParisian Exports and Silicon Valley Imports on Episode... View full entry
You’ve probably heard that today is International Women’s Day. But what exactly is it? And why is it important?For many in the global West, the significance of March 8th is probably a lot less familiar than, say, Mother’s Day. In fact, the holidays originated around the same time, during the... View full entry
For a while I’ve held the belief that identifying oneself as an architect is a kind of drag, a mannered persona donned for effect. How else to describe the clichéd sartorial signifiers: extreme eyewear, black daywear and designer footwear? As the education of an architect is so historically weighted to a canon of male practitioners, theorists and educators, a woman entering the field often operates as a kind of architectural androgyne... — Mimi Zeiger | Architectural Review
"...we are trained to see world of design through black-framed, male-coloured glasses. Gender differentiation, then, comes with a thorny rhetorical question: ‘What’s the difference?’ If the goal is to recognise talent, experimentation and innovation, there seems no reason to create a binary... View full entry
It's hard to remember that just a few decades ago it was difficult, if not impossible, for a woman alone to take out a mortgage. Federal legislation changed that.
And yet, it's still surprising to learn how dominant single women have become in the housing market today: Their share is second only to married couples, and twice that of single men.
— npr.org
Related stories in the Archinect news:Millennials, not forming enough householdsA look at the growing influence of immigrants on the American housing marketLooking to buy a home in SF? Good luck View full entry
Amnesty International and the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, recently presented reports on the vulnerable position of women refugees and the dangers they face.
Europe is failing to provide basic protection for them, the Amnesty report stated.
This problem is now all the more critical because the percentage of women among the refugees who travel through Europe has risen dramatically.
— Al Jazeera
"All the women interviewed for the Amnesty report said that they felt unsafe and threatened during the various stages of their journey. Women are at greater risk of becoming victims of violence, robbery and extortion... There is also the threat of rape and sexual assault by smugglers, security... View full entry
As the first sole woman to win the medal in its 167-year history (women have shared the prize with others before), Zaha Hadid said, "I am very proud to be awarded the Royal Gold Medal, in particular, to be the first woman to receive the honor in her own right. Part of architecture’s job is to... View full entry
All those things that people talk about but you don't realize it until you go through it yourself... not feeling adequate, feeling like a failure...
Rosa Sheng, founder of Equity by Design and architect at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson in San Francisco, talks with KQED's Aarti Shahani about the hemorrhaging of women in architecture after graduation. Nowadays, about half of architecture graduates are women, but in the practicing workforce, that... View full entry
Architecture is both expansive and specific, artistic and technical. Agrest says that even after teaching and practicing the discipline for over 40 years, she still marvels at how much there is to learn.
'Architecture is really difficult. I realized that only very recently,' she says. 'It's like music. You can enjoy it but — to know it — it's a different story.'
Another bit of wisdom she shares with her students: The career of an architect blossoms late.
— npr.org
Now at 70 years old, Diana Agrest reflects on some of her teaching and design approaches in her illustrious career, with those approaches having influenced both former and current students and fellow educators alike.Related View full entry
As we were getting off the plane he asked me what I was doing that evening: “Catching a train, I am afraid,” I said. “ Pity. You are fat and I like my women fat. We could have spent a pleasant night together.” He said this quite casually. [...] So gigantic was Corb’s egotism that he probably considered it enough of an honour for a humble mortal to provide a genius like him with a night’s relaxation. — theguardian.com
Being a woman practicing in the fields of architecture, engineering, construction and the like is already a triumph in itself — let alone leading the design and construction of a built project. To honor this, the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation just launched Built By Women NYC, a... View full entry
Women are architecture's original rebels. Over 120 years ago, they insisted that architecture schools and professional organisations open their doors to women, arguing that the field would thrive (or wither) according to the diversity of its students and practitioners...And yet despite this long history of challenging architecture to be inclusive, women have been given little credit for their contributions. — Al Jazeera
Despina Stratigakos, historian and University at Buffalo architecture professor highlights in her Opinion article how women in architecture have challenged and continue to challenge the deep-rooted patriarchy in the field of architecture throughout the past century. Although there is a growing... View full entry
"There's still a glass ceiling, ironically, in architecture," said Rosa Sheng, senior associate at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson in San Francisco and chairwoman of the Missing 32% Project, a group that promotes equitable treatment of all architects. "There's an influx of more women coming in, but the hurdles haven't changed," she said. It takes roughly 12 years to become a licensed architect, according to NCARB. — The Wall Street Journal
Well before American women could vote, these college-educated few rose to the pinnacle of their fields as garden designers, writers and photographers. Declaring American gardens to be distinct from those in Europe, they took as their mission the beautification of America, whose cities were polluted and whose residents were suffering from decades of grinding income disparity and rampant industrialism. [...]
“It really was landscape gardening as social activism.”
— washingtonpost.com
In 1980, when Marsha Maytum was a fledgling designer at the San Francisco architecture firm EHDD, the majority of women on construction sites were centerfolds. [...]
Nearly 35 years later, progress has been measurable but mixed. Women make up 25 percent of architecture staff in the U.S., though they now earn 42 percent of the architecture degrees.
— curbed.com
